Teacher recruitment and retention is emerging as a universal challenge, across and beyond Europe (United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession, 2024). The challenge is not only to recruit sufficient numbers of teachers and encourage them to stay in the profession, but also to recruit teachers of sufficiently high quality (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018). These messages are not only present in policy and research literature, but are also explicit in news headlines, e.g. “Teaching in Australia has become a refuge for the least able” (Christopher Allen, Australian Online, 6/10/2023) and ‘Teacher recruitment in Scotland banded ‘brutal’ as schools struggle to fill science roles’ (Daily Record, 11 October 2023).  

Influenced heavily by supranational agencies such as UNESCO and OECD, many nation states look to entry policies for initial teacher education programmes as a potential solution: they need to be sufficiently flexible to encourage a wide enough pool of entrants, but sufficiently ‘high’ to ensure teacher quality. Entry policies convey messages about how a country understands teacher quality, but they also, arguably, provide insight into what countries believe the ‘problem’ with teacher recruitment to be, leading to the suggestion of potential solutions. We therefore seek to build understanding by exploring entry policies for teaching in the contexts of Australia and Scotland, seeking to identify ways entry requirements are positioned, implicitly or explicitly, as proxies for teacher quality. Our study is framed by the question ‘what do nationally mandated ITE entry requirements reveal about policy discourse relating to teacher quality and supply?’  Thus, we seek to problematise such policies in order to better understand the ‘work’ they do in terms of shaping discourses; the initial phase of this study, including a European context and an Australasian one, speaks to the conference focus on acknowledging the power of research that is able to draw on the richness of individual contexts, yet use knowledge of different contexts to theorise across issues of interest. 

The process of selecting teachers to enter teacher education programmes has emerged based on research that suggests that having a “good” teacher is one of the more important predictors of student success (Lehane et al., 2023). Processes for selecting the ‘best’ candidates emerged during an era where the demand for places exceeded the supply, a situation that is stark contrast to the contemporary global teacher shortage (United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession, 2024). The result was the development of a range of selection measures that assessed both cognitive and non-cognitive applicant suitability for initial teacher education programmes (Barnes & Cross, 2023; Klassen et al., 2020; Lehane et al., 2023). These measures are currently being questioned both in terms of whether they are valid ways to make inferences about aspiring teachers’ suitability for the profession (Klassen et al., 2020), are they even important (Bardach & Klassen, 2020) and might they actually act as a barrier to entry for teacher education in times of shortage (Barnes & Cross, 2020). In a time of teacher shortage, issues of quality – however conceived – arguably become eclipsed by issues of quantity. 

Our study seeks to understand better the policy movements, at both national and international levels, that influence how entry requirements are represented in national policies, and the potential implications of such representations. We hope to provide a framework for problematising ITE entry policies that can then be scaled up and used across a wider range of countries, thereby providing a more powerful, cumulative body of work that will allow us to support the aspiration articulated in the conference theme to better understand both the contemporary and future world of education. 

Our methodological approach is framed by Bacchi's (2009) ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach, which unlike conventional policy analysis focuses on the way that problems are constructed rather than on how they are solved. She explains it thus: 'if you look at a particular problem, you can see that it understands the ‘problem’ to be a particular kind of ‘problem’. Policies, therefore, constitute (or gives shape to) problems. Hence, rather than reacting to ‘problems’, governments are active in the creation (or production) of policy ‘problems' (Bacchi, 2009, p. 1). This approach, drawing on poststructuralist and feminist epistemologies, does not see policy problems as neutral and uncontentious, instead it sees the construction of policy problems as a way to gain insight into how governments (and other policy makers) view represent their worlds. The WPR approach allows us to adopt a particular orientation to what might broadly be considered to fall under critical discourse studies (CDS) approach, something that (Van Dijk, T.A., 2015, p. 63) suggests is ‘more problem-oriented than discipline-oriented, and requires a multidisciplinary approach.’ Drawing on Bacchi’s (2009) WPR approach and it’s six overarching questions, and aligning with what Van Dijk (2015) would describe as a socio-cognitive perspective on discourse analysis, we developed an analytical framework to allow consistent interrogation of policy documents, asking the following questions of selected policy documents: 1. What’s the ‘problem’ that entry requirements are being designed to address in terms of quality and/or quantity? 2. How is ‘quality’ represented in the policy? 3. To what extent do entry requirements offer affordances or constraints to achieving a diverse teacher workforce? E.g. language, disability, gender, culture  4. What presuppositions or assumptions underpin this representation of the ‘problem’? 5. What is left unproblematic in this representation of entry requirements? (Where are the silences?) 6. Who has responsibility for deciding and regulating the enactment of the policy? 7. In what ways are the lead documents codependent upon other policies and reviews in ITE e.g. professional standards?   8. What consequences arise from this representation of entry requirements? 9. What possibilities does the policy leave for thinking differently about the ‘problem’? 10. How could this representation be questioned, disrupted and replaced? Documents selected for analysis met the following criteria: they are publicly available; they make explicit mention of entry requirements for ITE programmes; they are ‘official’ national statements that require to be adhered to.

Findings reveal that the ‘problem’ of entry requirements tends be located in a fairly stable and old-fashioned view which equates teacher quality with school-level academic achievement, drawing on the idea of ‘qualifications’ as the primary proxy for quality. Academic entry qualifications in this context often serves as a prediction of quality on exit. This begs questions about the impact of ITE programmes if entry qualifications remain the strongest predictor of successful graduates and raises questions about the evidence base on which this view is premised (something that is not made explicit in the policy documents analysed). While this representation of quality (Harvey, 2007) dominates both countries’ policy documents, more recent concerns over supply and representativeness of the teaching workforce can be seen to have influenced most recent version of the policies texts. Overall, we conclude that the analytical framework, has the capacity to reveal the presence of common narratives and shared representations of the problem. We therefore suggest that deploying this same methodological approach within a wider range of national contexts could help to build a more coherent body of research that would allow us to speak back more powerfully to governments in pursuit of a teaching workforce fit for contemporary times.

Bacchi, C. (2012). Introducing the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’approach. Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges, 21–24. Bardach, L., & Klassen, R. M. (2020). Smart teachers, successful students? A systematic review of the literature on teachers’ cognitive abilities and teacher effectiveness. Educational Research Review, 30, 100312. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100312 Barnes, M., & Cross, R. (2023). Standardized Testing as a Gatekeeping Mechanism for Teacher Quality. In I. Menter (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Teacher Education Research (pp. 103–119). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16193-3_4 Cochran-Smith, M., Stringer Keefe, E., & Carney, M. C. (2018). Teacher educators as reformers: Competing agendas. European Journal of Teacher Education, 41(5), 572–590. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2018.1523391 Harvey, L. (2007). Epistemology of quality. Perspectives in Education, 25(3), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.10520/EJC87440 Klassen, R. M., Kim, L. E., Rushby, J. V., & Bardach, L. (2020). Can we improve how we screen applicants for initial teacher education? Teaching and Teacher Education, 87, 102949. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.102949 Lehane, P., Lysaght, Z., & O’Leary, M. (2023). A validity perspective on interviews as a selection mechanism for entry to initial teacher education programmes. European Journal of Teacher Education, 46(2), 293–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2021.1920920 United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession: Recommendations and summary of deliberations. (2024, February 23). Education International. https://www.ei-ie.org/en/item/28334:united-nations-secretary-generals-high-level-panel-on-the-teaching-profession-recommendations-and-summary-of-deliberations Van Dijk, T.A., D. (2015). The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Wiley Blackwell, 2015, 466–485.